After last week's post about GeNext, the sons and daughters of the X-Men, I couldn't help but wonder how many other people remembered the first series of stories to truly show how difficult it would be for the offspring of those who spent their time trying to save the world on a regular basis... especially when your parents were the most famous super-heroes in the entire world. That's right, people; I'm talking about Superman Jr. and Batman Jr. - better known to the world as the Super Sons.

The Super Sons series, which ran on-and-off in the pages of Superman/Batman team-up title World's Finest from 1973 through 1976, was yet another creation of Bob Haney, the man who also gave the world Teen Titans and the Doom Patrol. Apparently feeling as if Superman and Batman themselves weren't hip enough for the kids of the '70s, Haney randomly created a series of stories that saw both heroes married to women whose faces were never seen, and both of them with nearly identical children - you could only tell them apart from their fathers by the size of their sideburns - called Clark Kent Jr. and Bruce Wayne Jr. Two kids with parental issues the size of Canada, and a desire to show the world how "hip" to modern "jive" they could be.

The stories themselves are dated masterpieces of failed relevance - The two teen heroes have a tendency to try to find themselves and/or 1970s "America," only to fuck up and have to be saved by their dads on a regular basis - and apparently hated even by others working at DC Comics at the time; three years after their creation, writer Denny O'Neil wrote a story that explained that all of the stories were the product of some malfunctioning computer simulation that the "real" Superman and Batman liked to run, after being given the job by his editor of coming up with some way of killing the characters off once and for all. Not that it did that job - in 1999, Haney revived the Sons for one last story, and a collection of the entire run was published last year as Saga of The Super Sons, giving everyone the chance to relive the adventures of two boys on two motorbikes trying to escape the shadows of their more famous fathers... by dressing and acting exactly like them.

Crazy in Love: The Saga of the Super-Sons [Living Between Wednesdays]